The Queen's Necklace (71 page)

Just when he was beginning to truly close the distance, just when he began to believe he must overtake her, she ran through a pair of double doors. Entering the room only seconds behind her, Raith came to a sudden bewildered halt. The room seemed to offer a myriad of exits, of doors both open and closed, of archways leading into endless vistas of chambers and corridors, receding in the distance. How was he ever to choose correctly between such a multitude of possibilities?

Then he realized that he had fallen victim to an optical illusion. The walls had been painted trompe l'oeil: most of these doors and archways did not even exist; they were merely clever examples of the painter's art.

With that knowledge, it took only a moment to detect the true from the false. Redoubling his efforts, he raced across the chamber, through an open doorway, and sprinted down the long stone-flagged corridor he found on the other side.

Even so, he might never have caught up with her, had it not been for the fast-moving fire, which eventually allowed him to corner Ys between a churning wall of smoke and a locked door.

Turning to face him, pressing one hand to the front of her gown as if in an effort to slow her racing heartbeat, Ys was trembling but nevertheless defiant. During that moment of recognition which had passed between them in the room upstairs, she had guessed Raith's secret, just as he had learned hers. But there had been something more, a natural antagonism, as though she had realized something about him that he did not even know about himself.

<
You are just like her! You might be Valentine's twin.>
Her mental exclamation
had echoed in his brain, though he had little idea what the words meant.

Now she asked that question again, this time hissing it out between her teeth, past her labored breathing. “Who are you—what kind of Goblin are you, to make common cause with these Human creatures?”

“My name—my true name, signifies Fury—and also Retribution.” Yet even as Raith moved toward her, he felt a certain reluctance. Had he, in the excitement of the chase, been able to overtake her, he might easily have used his tremendous strength to snap her neck, to crack her spine, to kill her in an instant. There would have been no time then for second thoughts. But to do it now in cold blood—when she was trapped, when she was helpless, when he saw her cringe against the wall, trembling with apprehension despite her best efforts to appear courageous—that went against every instinct.

Nevertheless, a lifetime of discipline, of stern repression of his ardent nature, had schooled the Leveller to put his sense of duty even over his strongest inclinations. And so he continued to advance inexorably. “In your case,” he said, with a regretful shake of his head, “I very much fear that my name must also mean—Death.”

“Then die!” said Ys, reaching inside the neck of her gown. Something slender and shining appeared in her hand. Before he had time to react, she plunged the glass dagger into his chest, just under the breastbone and between two of his ribs, where it felt like a sliver of fire inside him. As she jerked her hand back, the blade snapped off just below the twisted hilt, and remained there buried in his breast.

As Luke and Lili ran along the gallery toward the stairs, billows of black smoke were already roiling on the floor below, and flames licked at the bottom steps.

“It looks as though the rebels have broken past the gate and set
the palace on fire from within.” Luke leaned for a moment over the railing, to get a better look. “It seems to be every place at once.”

Taking Lili by the arm, he pulled her along the gallery behind him. “We'll have to find another way out. Look, you can see more of the flames through that half-open door. That room is the library and those fine old volumes will go up like tinder, if they haven't al—”

An enveloping cloud of dark smoke put an end to this speech; the rest was lost in a paroxysm of choking and coughing. Yet Lucius continued blindly on. More by instinct than by anything else, he found a door and opened it, pulled Lili through, and slammed it shut behind them. Though the air was better here, it was a minute before Lili could stop coughing and speak again.

“Is there another way down?”

Luke nodded. His face and clothes were smudged and his eyes had turned red from the smoke. Lili supposed she looked much the same, and her own eyes felt dry and burning.

“There is a back stair. We will hope that someone overlooked that particular escape route—or never knew that it existed in the first place.”

They hurried through a series of intersecting chambers, until Luke opened a door on a narrow corridor and they both stepped through. The air here was cool and untainted; it seemed they had outrun the fire. At the end of the passage, Lili could see flights of steps leading up and down.

“This way is used only by the servants. I doubt many people even know there are stairs here. There is some advantage to having been raised at Lindenhoff—and to being an extraordinarily curious child!”

Down the steps went Lili and Lucius, through another door, and along another corridor. But now the air grew hot again; it tasted of smoke. “We are on the ground floor. There is an intersecting corridor that you can see just ahead. If we turn left, there is a door to the gardens. It's possible—”

He broke off as they rounded the corner. A wall of flame blocked their path to the door, and flakes of burning ash danced in the air. The fire was too high and too broad to safely jump over. Luke began pulling Lili back in the other direction, but she managed to wrench herself free out of his grasp. “I think—I think I can pass through the flames without being harmed; I've done something like that before.” She hesitated. “But that would mean abandoning you.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Don't delay on my account. It may be that I'll find another way out, but if I can't—you
must
escape with the Jewel if you can. Too many lives are depending on it.” He gave her a gentle push in the direction of the garden door.

Realizing that he spoke the truth, Lili reached out and clasped his hand briefly, then turned back toward the fire. The wall of flame rose up before her, beating her back with its heat. The air shimmered, and bright sparks of burning paint whirled madly on every side of her. For a moment it seemed as though the entire castle was melting around her. Lili held the precious jeweled casket closer, wondering if she really dared to attempt this. It had been one thing to pass her hand through a flame during her initiation, it was another and a far more perilous thing, to step into the heart of fire now.

She remembered what Sir Bastian had said to her. “
You were in a state of extraordinary mental excitement at the time and your powers were very great. But I would not, if I were you, attempt to do any of those things under any other circumstances. The least distraction, even a momentary twinge of self-doubt, would cause you to fail
.”

But I must not fail
, Lili told herself.
I dare not
. There was simply too much at stake. She closed her eyes and stepped boldly forward.

She felt only the faintest sensation of heat as she passed through the fire. When she opened her eyes again, she was already several yards on the other side. With a gasp and a laugh of sheer relief, Lili moved on to the door, flung it open, and passed through to the fresher air outside.

She would never know how long she wandered through the gardens, growing more and more exhausted and confused. Walls and gates and boxwood hedges continually rose up to block her way and turn her aside again and again, until—in her fatigue and distress—she finally lost all sense of direction. It seemed that she spent long hours merely walking in circles, while the sun dipped below the horizon, and the midsummer twilight went from grey to deep violet and back to grey again.

At last she came out in an immense stone-paved courtyard, where dark figures moved to and fro against the glaring light of the flames. Whether they were fighting the holocaust or urging it on she did not know, but because she was simply too tired to go on, she sat heavily down on a low brick wall and passively awaited further events.

Minutes or hours later, she heard a soft feminine voice speaking her name. When she looked up, Tremeur was standing just a few feet away. With her were two old men, and a younger man, very pale and emaciated, being supported by the others. The young man was undoubtedly a stranger—Lili had no name in her mind to go with his face—yet there was something teasingly familiar about him, too.

“This is Raith's Doctor Wildebaden,” said Tremeur, indicating one of the two old men. “And this is his cousin, who is Luke's Doctor Purcell. And this other man, Lili, is His Majesty, King Jarred of Winterscar, who is not dead after all.”

“Then this belongs to you, sir,” said Lili, gratefully handing the music box over. “You will know far better than I do what is to be done with it.”

“I do—and I thank you for bringing it back to me,” he replied, in a voice worn thin by illness. “I fear there will be a heavy price to be paid for my carelessness in losing it. But perhaps it is not too late to avert the very worst consequences.”

The second old man, the one Tremeur had identified as Doctor Purcell, helped the king into a waiting carriage, and Doctor Wildebaden offered Lili his hand. “Madam, what the king has to do is best done in some quiet place away from all of these distractions. And this is no place for a gentlewoman. Will you not come away with us?”

Lili gave a weary shake of his head, refusing his assistance. “I can't go without Wilrowan—without my husband. He may still be inside.”

“In that case, there is nothing you can do to aid him. And if he and your other friends have found their way safely out of the palace, perhaps they are seeking you even now at my house.”

But Lili would not be moved. “He won't go anywhere without trying to find me first. And I won't go until I know what has happened to him. There may, as you say, be nothing I can do to help him—but I can wait for him.”

“Then, I will wait with you,” said Tremeur, sitting down on the low brick wall beside her, slipping a small cold hand into one of Lili's. “We will wait here together for Captain Blackheart, Luke, and the others.”

S
o they sat quietly together, the two dazed and exhausted young women, while the twilight passed away and the sun came up, and the fire continued to burn.

When a tall lean man dressed all in black moved past her, Lili started up, thinking that it must be Raith. But it was not. The man in black was joined by a another, similarly garbed, and they both set to work assisting the fire-fighters.

“They are Levellers,” said Tremeur, as Lili dropped down beside her again. “I met an Anti-demonist on the way to Doctor Wildebaden's. When I mentioned Raith, he said—Lili, he said the Levellers were waiting to hear from him in this time of trial. Though it was very odd the way that he said the name. He pronounced it ‘Wrath.' Then he took me to a kind of church, and—they are the most amazing people! They never doubted anything I told them, and they offered to help me at once.”

Perhaps, after that, Lili dozed off for a time. There followed a long, long period of grey incoherence, during which she entertained a dim impression that the confusion on every side of her gradually died down.

Then a dearly familiar voice was saying her name, over and over
again. Tremeur moved aside, a strong arm encircled Lili's waist, and a lively hazel-eyed face was on a level with her own—very much obscured by smoke and sweat, but not to be mistaken for all that. “Lili, Lili, I thought I had lost you.”

She gave a sob of relief and buried her face against Wilrowan's shoulder.

Lindenhoff continued to burn for several days. Though an effective effort was made to keep the fire from spreading to the nearest buildings, no attempt was made to save the palace itself. What could burn did burn, until there was nothing left but blackened brick and stone, and piles of ash.

The city had escaped destruction. She was scarcely recognizable, to be sure, very much battered and smoke-stained, but only a few buildings had fallen during the rumblings caused by the volcano. It was doubtful that Tarnburgh would ever regain her former dignity, or her easy, elegant way of life—even after the smuts and ashes were cleaned away—but she looked like she would survive the end of one civilization just as she had survived the one before it.

From the top floors at Doctor Wildebaden's house, Lili could just make out the smoking ruin that was Lindenhoff. She knew that she had been fortunate to come out of the holocaust alive, fortunate, too, that Will had been spared. Though she could not remember seeing Trefallon in the courtyard—being much too absorbed in Wilrowan—Blaise had apparently been at Will's side all along. According to Will, they had bound up each other's wounds after their fight with the guards, and hobbled to safety together. He had a limp now and Blaise was the one with his arm in a sling, but at least they were both alive. Eventually, old Doctor Purcell had discovered Luke, wandering the streets in a daze. Someone or something had hit him hard on the head; there was a deep gash, and two more days would pass before he knew his own name or remembered much of
anything else. But of Raith and Queen Ys there was still no word or sign.

“He would not allow her to escape,” Luke insisted, when he recovered enough to be told the news and to return a coherent reply. “They must both have died in the flames. It's not possible that Raith would allow her to escape.”

When the fire was finally extinguished, a search was made of the ruins. Several bodies turned up, many of them burnt beyond recognition, apparently those of rioters or guards, as none of them was small enough or large enough to suggest either the queen or the Leveller. Lili, of course, had not expected otherwise. If what people said of Queen Ys was true, there would be very little left—no more than there would be of Raith—not even so much as a rag or a bone. And who would notice two small piles of silvery ash, amidst the ashes of an entire palace?